Repatriating Technology

Here is a very cool idea: take a lot of technology, put it in a very portable container and wheel it around to normally inaccessible places. Nothing that new with the idea? Perhaps not, but Mervin Jarman is doing it up pretty right with the iStreet Lab and larger Container Project. Although a little lengthy, this vid gives a pretty good overview of the Container Project in general with some focus on the iStreet Lab near the end.

The brainy aspect of it breaks down to “a socially engineered piece of technology for community development and youth crime prevention“. The technologically awesome part busts out of the fact that a loaded iMac with five other laptops and accessories are stuffed into commercial size recycle containers and made 100 percent mobile for on the street use. Focusing on video, audio and other digital media production, the iStreet Lab project sets up street corner workshops as a way to introduce street involved bad ass mo’fos to digital media in hopes of recycling their guns and knives into beats and visuals. Need iStreet Lab’s M.O. shown off in a comic book stylee? Or if you don’t like to read you can check out this very small video.

It’s one thing to jam gear into a box and call it a lab. It’s another thing to create a mobile workcentre complete with amps and speakers, tool kit, storage server, FM and digital audio broadcast transmitters and a handfull of other truly useful things all in a bin.

Although still officially under construction, the mongrel collective and Mongrelstreet.org is a place to keep an eye on as a crew that are doing cool things involving Jarman and a bunch of like minded people dealing with technology. I’ll let you follow the links and explore the multiple levels of things going on here but let’s just give a real quick tip of the lid to something that packages a crap load of technology into a wheeled container, offers accessibility to literally anyone standing on a street corner, deals with feared and shunned street youth, promotes human and technological goodness and does it in multiple cities in multiple countries. For real.